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"...Today's Electoral College is not what the Framers designed. In the early nineteenth century, it changed from a deliberative system to a winner-take-all system.
The Framers did not want America to have political parties: they hated them. So they designed a system that did not take them into account. In an era where media was slow and local, they worried that different states would vote for favorite sons for president. The Electoral College was supposed to enable states to send their leaders to deliberate over who was the best candidate of all those proposed. If they could agree, great. But if not-- and the Framers expected electors would frequently disagree-- the election would go to the House of Representatives, where every state would get one vote, total. (That was what brought the smaller states on board; NOT the Electoral College, which always favored bigger states.)
The system broke down immediately. In the first two elections, George Washington won easily. But in 1796, he stepped down, in part because the nation has already split into two political parties (which he warned against in his farewell address). In that year's election, Virginia's Thomas Jefferson lost to John Adams of Massachusetts. But Jefferson's supporters noted that, if all the Electors from Virginia had backed Jefferson, he would've won. So in 1800, Virginia decided to give all its Electoral College votes to one person: the "winner-take-all" system. It worked. Jefferson won the White House.
All the other states realized they had to follow suit or their own favored candidates would be dead in the water. So they did. By 1824, the Electoral College was not a brake on popular enthusiasms, it was an accelerator, encouraging partisanship, regionalism, and splitting the country.
This was precisely why the Framers were worried about parties in the first place, and in 1823, James Madison wrote to a friend and called for a constitutional amendment to get rid of the winner-take-all system. It never happened, of course, because a party in power almost never wants to change the system. (It is interesting, though, that all four presidents who have won in the Electoral College after losing the popular vote have been Republicans.)
Further compounding the problems with the Electoral College is that the House of Representatives no longer accurately reflects state population since Congress permanently capped the number of representatives at 435 in 1929. Almost a century later, this means that large states like California, New York, and Florida have fewer votes in the Electoral College than they should have under the Framers' original system.
It is not clear to me how, exactly to resolve the problem we face: that our system of electing presidents is giving us leaders that do not represent the will of the people. But I do know the system needs to be fixed, and that it is important to understand that what we currently have is not at all what the Framers set up in the first place. |
